1
Love doesn’t just touch you—it rewrites you.
It gets under the armour, past the walls, slipping between the cracks of who you think you are and splicing new code into your being. Love has high penetrating power. It works its way in like a virus or a gene-editing enzyme, excising pieces of you and stitching something new in their places. Love has the targeted DNA shearing power of a CRISPR protein, and in the aftermath of the double-stranded snip, cellular repair squadrons swoop in to rewrite parts of your psyche with the borrowed strands of another’s genome. And once the new code is in, once the sequence has been altered, you are never quite the same again.
I can see this in myself. It took me a long time to notice how much of me is a patchwork of people and things I have loved. How much I am a chimera, a genetic mosaic made from every connection that has ever mattered to me. New ways of thinking, new instincts, new affinities—traits that seemingly didn’t exist before, now woven into the fabric of who I am. Sometimes, the transformation is stark and undeniable. Other times, it’s subtle, a quiet shift in perspective that only reveals itself in long hindsight.
This is why love can be terrifying. It changes you, and not always in ways you expect.
2
There is a reason that heat is a catalyst for many chemical reactions involving DNA. Love doesn’t just change you—it warms you up, makes you malleable, softens the rigid structures inside of you. It moves through you like fire, like water, like something that has the power to undo all the careful ways you’ve held yourself together. There’s a reason why the most intense moments of love, grief, passion, or revelation feel like they shake you apart—because they do. Love pumps energy into you, heightens your emotional frequency, and suddenly, you are no longer solid. You are vibrating, melting, reforming. Some transformations happen slowly, like water carving stone over centuries, the edges smoothing so gradually you don’t even notice the change until you compare yourself to who you once were. Others happen in an instant, like an atom bomb detonating inside your chest, obliterating old structures before you can even understand what has happened.
I like to think that we were all born as plasticine blobs, pre-shaped to an extent, but mostly undifferentiated. We begin as something soft, impressionable, capable of being molded. Our nature (genetics) sets the basic parameters—the hue, the density, the initial form of our sculpture. But it is experience, it is connection, it is love that presses into us, leaving imprints, reshaping us into something new. Some experiences leave small marks, barely perceptible indentations, while others press in so deeply that they change our entire shape. Over time, we become a mosaic of everything that has ever touched us. And it isn’t just love as we understand it that does this—it’s anything that moves us. Anything that stirs emotion, anything that heats you up, has the power to reconfigure you; love just does it best. It is the things you don’t care about that tend to leave you unchanged.
This is why resistance to love can feel like freezing—a rigid refusal to let yourself soften, to let warmth reach the places that have been locked in ice. The more frozen you are, the harder it is for love to get in. You convince yourself that you are protecting something essential, that staying solid, staying intact, is the safest thing to do. But the moment you allow yourself to feel, to be fully immersed in the present, to surrender to the current of transformation—you melt. And melting isn’t destruction. It is the return to something fluid, something adaptable, something capable of flowing into the spaces you were never able to reach before.
There’s a theory that heightened emotion is the key to manifestation; that a clear vision accompanied by strong feelings is what opens the door to change. When love (or joy, bliss, gratitude, etc.) floods you with energy, it makes you plastic, pliable, open to new possibilities. It breaks down old bonds, dissolving rigid beliefs about who you are, allowing something new to take shape. This is why change so often feels like an unraveling—because it is. You are being taken apart so that you can be put back together in a way that better fits the person you are becoming.
Maybe this is why love changes people so profoundly. Maybe this is why it feels like some force greater than yourself is at work when you fall deeply into it. It is not just affection. It is not just connection. It is a process of alchemical transformation. And if you let it in, if you surrender to it, if you allow it to warm you, shake you, melt you—you will become something new.
3
Love is supposed to change you. That’s its nature, and our nature. But what happens when you resist that change? What happens when you brace yourself against it, trying to hold your shape, refusing to let love reach inside you?
There are so many reasons why someone might harden themselves against love. Maybe it’s the fear of losing control, the fear that if you let yourself be changed too much, you will no longer recognize who you are. Maybe it’s the belief that you must protect yourself, that being reshaped by someone else’s presence is a kind of invasion. Or maybe you’ve been burned before—maybe you’ve opened yourself in the past, let love carve into you, only to feel like you have been left with a worse version of yourself. And so, instead of letting love in, you fortify yourself against it. You put up walls. You tell yourself you will only love if you can control its effects, if you can keep yourself intact.
But love doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t ask permission before it starts rearranging you. And if you try to resist, if you brace against the impact, the result is not safety—it’s damage. It’s like trying to contain an explosion by tensing every muscle in your body, believing that if you just hold yourself together tightly enough, no one will see or feel the blast. But the force has to go somewhere. And instead of being absorbed, instead of integrating, instead of flowing through you naturally, the energy turns inward.
This is where love turns into suffering. Because resisting love doesn’t keep you from being reshaped—it fractures you like brittle ice. The parts of you that were meant to grow and expand instead become compressed, tangled, distorted. And eventually, when love is forced into such an unnatural shape, it curdles. It can become resentment, fear, even hatred.
Hatred, in a strange way, is its own form of love. It is not cold. It is not indifferent. It is heightened emotion, and like all heightened emotions, it has the power to change you. This is why disdain and contempt are so dangerous in relationships. The moment you begin to look down on someone, to view them with a sense of superiority or judgment, your brain begins protecting you from them. It starts whittling down your capacity to feel love for them, because deep down, it knows that love begets openness, and openness means allowing yourself to be changed. If you are afraid of that change—if you overemphasize their flaws and convince yourself you would never want to be altered by them—you begin to love them less. One of my favourite quotes, which you likely will have heard if you know me in real life, is “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” I know for a fact that I have loved and hated something strongly at the same time. I never loved or hated something at the same time as feeling indifferent towards it.
Sometimes, that aforementioned “disdain” protection mechanism fails. Sometimes you love someone or something even when you believe you shouldn’t. Maybe it reinforces the most self-destructive parts of you. Maybe it brings out a version of yourself that you don’t want to be. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that the love is wrong, that you must fight it, that you cannot let it touch you. And yet, despite everything, it still does. Love is not always gentle. Sometimes it is an earthquake. Sometimes it is a wildfire. And sometimes, it is a force you try to resist with everything in you, only to find that it has already reshaped you in ways you can’t undo.
4
How do you know that you’ve loved something? Not just liked it, not just appreciated it, but truly let it touch you, seep into you, change you?
My simple proposal is this: if you are different after it, you have loved it. Love is transformation. It does not leave you as it found you. The things you have loved shape you, leave their fingerprints in your psyche, their colors in your soul. The things that have mattered to you are woven into your very being, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes so subtly that you don’t even notice until years later, when you catch yourself doing something, saying something, believing something—and you realize, this wasn’t the same me as before.
That’s how you know love was there. You are a mosaic of everything you’ve ever felt those heightened emotions about. A genetic chimera, a patchwork creature assembled from the fragments of people, ideas, moments that have left imprints on you. If you look closely enough, you can trace the lines, find the seams, see the places where the architecture of your identity has been altered. And the most profound changes are not always from the people you spent the most time with. Some shifts happen in an instant. Some influences cut so deep, they become part of you overnight. Others take longer, working their way in over time, settling into the crevices of your being until they are indistinguishable from the rest of you.
But here’s the thing that’s always true—you have to be open to love’s influence.
Because: resisting and struggling against it warps you. Love requires a kind of surrender, a willingness to let yourself be reshaped. When you fight against it, when you try to control the process, you don’t actually stop the transformation—you just make it more painful. Love will change you, whether you want it to or not. But how it changes you depends on your ability to allow, to receive, to flow with it rather than against it.
I’m starting to understand what it means to be open to having love alchemize me. To allow it to move through me rather than trying to leash it. To trust that whatever it shifts in me was always meant to be uncovered, was always part of me, just waiting to be activated.
I guess I’m a mosaic in the same way that the art I make is. A combination of different textures, different influences, different materials fused together into something uniquely mine. I am a multimedia piece—shaped by music I’ve listened to, books I’ve read, places I’ve been, people I’ve known, and the emotions I have let myself fully feel.
Love gets into all your nooks and crannies, filling the spaces between the pieces of you, fusing them together in ways you never could have done alone. Its penetrating power is high—it seeps in like psilocybin, rewiring your brain, revealing new pathways, opening doors you didn’t even know existed. And once you’ve seen yourself through love’s lens, you can’t unsee it.
If I had never loved the way I have, I know for a fact I would not be the person I am now. But trying to trace back the exact influences, to extract which exact pieces came from where, feels impossible. Maybe it doesn’t even matter. All I know is that if I want to keep growing, if I want to keep evolving into whoever I am meant to become, I have to keep seeking love. In people, in experiences, in the quiet moments of resonance that pull me toward something I don’t fully understand yet.
Because love is a mirror. It reflects back the parts of you that you haven’t fully met yet. And when you let it in, when you surrender to the way it rearranges you, you become something new.
Love has changed me deeply, and I hope love changes me 10,000 times over again.
BRONZE FROG 